Criminal - Like A Bad Dream

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

One day in 2011, Lindsey Schweigert’s roommate came home to an open garage, a missing dog, and an overflowing bathtub. Lindsey remembers waking up in police custody. Ramya Nagesh is the author of A Practical Guide to Insane and Non-Insane Automatism in Criminal Law – Sleepwalking, Blackouts, Hypoglycaemia, and Other Issues. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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step by step what you did, you know, that evening, where you'd been, and then what the day had been like. Gosh, I remember it so vividly. So I had actually, the night before, I had returned from a trip at the Pentagon where I was working on a large project with the government. I was jet lagged. I was exhausted. I'd gotten in really late. So the next day, I had. I remember sleeping in. I remember doing some things around the house. And then I went to fill my prescription. After I did that, I remember making myself a nice dinner.

Lindsay Schweigert lived in a house in St. Louis. After dinner, she says she went to bed early around 8 p.m. Lindsay's roommate got home a few hours later. First thing he noticed was that my garage was up and the car was gone. I never left my garage up ever. You could get right into the house that way. It was late at night. I would never do that.

Second thinking notice, the dog was gone. And then he went into the bathroom and the water in the bathtub was overflowing. I am not a bath person. I cannot tell you the last time I've taken a bath. He thought something might have happened to Lindsay, like she'd been kidnapped. He called the police. And when he called a second time, they told him, Lindsay was in jail.

Lindsay says the last thing she remembers is falling asleep in her bed. When she woke up, she didn't know where she was. I remember being cold and wet, and then I remember being in the back of the police car and handcuffs. An officer told her she'd been driving

and hit another car. Apparently, she'd refused to take a breathalyzer test, and she'd fallen three times when she was instructed to walk in a straight line. It was raining. I don't remember driving. I don't remember getting in my car.

I was like, I just went, I went to bed. I mean, I was so out of it. I mean, if you even look at the mugshot from later, my eyes are just, my sweatshirt was on backwards. I was completely disoriented. Lindsay's dog was in the back seat of her car. They were less than a mile away from her house, outside of a steak and shake she liked to go to.

I remember being frantic with the officer, because he said that he's going to send my animal to the dog shelter. He took Lindsay to jail. Who did you call? My brother. And what did you say? I told him I have no idea what just happened to me, but I'm in jail, and Tyson is at the dog pound, and we have to go save my dog.

Lindsay was let out on bail. After her brother picked her up, they found her dog at the pound. They drove back to Lindsay's house. and her roommate told her what he'd seen, the open garage, the bathtub overflowing. Since Lindsay didn't remember what had happened that night, she wondered if at one point she might have had something to drink. She didn't really think so,

but she and her roommate checked. They went through the whole house, including the trash, and didn't find any sign that she'd been drinking. But she had taken a sleeping pill. For more than ten years, Lindsay had been having trouble sleeping. Her doctor prescribed her pills to help. And every so often, the medication would stop helping,

and her doctor would switch her prescription, trazidone, lunesta, then Ambien, and the generic version of Ambien, Zolpidem. Its warning label does include a long list of potential side effects, kind of in fine print, as they always are on these medications. under the extremely rare category, the drug now does warn that it can lead to strange behavior and abnormal thinking, and it specifically warns that you might get out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity you don't know you're doing. The next morning you may not remember you did anything during the night.

I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. In November of 1937, an article appeared in a Sunday newspaper magazine called The American Weekly. It described a detective named Robert Ledrew, who, 50 years earlier, was sent to a city on the coast of France to investigate a case of sailors who'd gone missing. He arrived there, he went to sleep, and the next day he went to introduce himself to the local police force, and they said, you know, hold the phone. Actually, a far more serious offence has been committed overnight. Somebody has been murdered. Rameh Nagesh is a lawyer in the UK. A man had been found on the beach.

been shot. His belonging seemed untouched, so it didn't look like a robbery. There were some footprints found around the beach where this person had been killed, and they took plaster casts of the footprints, and he looked at the footprints, and said, oh, these look really familiar. And by all reports, he spent the whole afternoon and kind of staring at these footprints, refusing to interview witnesses and looking more and more troubled, and then he announced he knew who had killed this man and retired to his room. And the next day, the sort of chief of police says, you know, we've recovered the bullet that killed the man. And he says, great, that will be the final bit of evidence I need. So he took

the bullet, opens his own revolver, sees that one bullet is missing and compared them and said, yes, this is the bullet that fits into the revolver. And he said, I've solved the case. I am the person who killed this man. And he said that he had killed this man, but he had done it whilst to sleep. Robert Ledrew was put in jail. To make sure it was possible that he could have killed someone in his sleep, the police gave him a gun full of blanks to sleep with. And one night, he got out of bed and shot at a guard, still asleep. The American Weekly reported that he was diagnosed with homicidal somnambulism, caused by overstaining his mind, and that he spent the remaining 50 years of his life on a farm, sleeping in a room with bars, under police supervision.

It's a case of the truth being almost stranger than fiction, I think. You know, I've never, I don't think I've ever sleepwalked in my life. I actually, I think that's one of the reasons I got so interested in it. When I was a child, I used to sleepwalk. I used to wake up near the front door with the keys in my hand. So clearly I was trying to escape or something in my sleep. But for over 20 years now, I've had an interest in the relationship between sleepwalking and committing crimes. People can do quite a lot of actions whilst they're asleep.

It's not just kind of mindlessly walking around. They can go up and downstairs. They can drive cars and open doors and things like that. In one case, a woman woke up and saw a garden axe sitting on her nightstand. It hadn't been there when she fell asleep. As she was texting her partner, she noticed messages from the night before that she didn't remember, about hearing voices and seeing things, and getting the axe from her tool shed for safety. Another time in Australia, a woman woke up holding a paintbrush

and then saw that she had apparently painted her front door in her sleep. There are stories of people waking up to find their furniture rearranged, or waking up feeling sick and realizing that during the night they'd eaten raw eggs, even the shells, uncooked rice, cat food, and cigarettes with butter on them. Doctors have described patients

who get dressed in things they wouldn't normally wear, going out in 20-degree weather, hardly wearing anything. What's the strangest thing that you've heard of someone doing, while asleep. Oh gosh. I heard of a case where a man would,

every night, he was sleeping on the ground floor, their bedroom was on the ground floor. He would lift his wife up and put her outside. So he would open the window, lift his wife up, and put her outside in the grass, and she'd wake up in the grass, sort of covered in dew or whatever. And her reaction was simply to put a mattress out there.

So that's quite strange. at one time people who sleepwalked were called noctambulai or night walkers some believed that they were possessed sleepwalking is something that's been known of for centuries I mean anyone who studied Macbeth in school knows that Macbeth's wife sleptwalked at having been involved in the murder in that play and was said to kind of wash her hands out of guilt quote, her eyes are open, but their sense is shut.

People sort of had this idea that if you were sleepwalking, you were maybe acting out your dreams. In 1859, an officer on patrol in London heard yelling coming from an apartment window. It was after one in the morning. It was a woman's voice, shouting, save my children. He heard a crashing sound and realized someone from the apartment had thrown something for a pane of glass above They hadn't opened the window. They'd thrown something through that glass. The woman shouting had thrown one of her children through the window, an 18-month-old. The baby was taken to a hospital with head injuries, but survived. The mother was charged

with attempted murder. She told police that she had thought that there was a fire. She'd been dreaming that there was a fire and she was trying to save her family. She had no previous convictions. everybody said that she was a good mother and her story that she'd been asleep at the time that she threw her baby out of the window was unheard of in England at the time. So then there was a debate between sort of the prosecution and the judge as to how they should proceed.

And the judge, you know, wasn't really having any of it at first. He said, well, you know, she was probably drunk. If I let her go now, he said she might go back to her family and throw another one out. He said, if I were to allow her to go at large, it would be opening a very wide door. A man might set fire to his house and say it had been done while he was dreaming. It would be a most dangerous plea to establish. But her solicitor pushed for there to be no charge in the case, and eventually the judge allowed her bail.

Ultimately, there was never a trial in the case, and so effectively her defence had been successful. A grand jury had refused to send the case to trial. It was the first time in the UK, as far as we know, that someone had successfully defended themselves in court by claiming to be asleep. But Rami and Agash says most sleepwalking doesn't involve dreaming at all. There is a condition called REM sleep disorder where you can act out your dreams,

but that's more rare than sleep walking, which happens in a different stage of sleep when you're, are not dreaming, and so people don't tend to act out their dreams. Two scientists working at the world's first sleep laboratory at the University of Chicago discovered REM sleep cycles in the 1950s. One of them, Nathaniel Klightman, had started the lab, and he often experimented on himself. Once he spent more than a month 150 feet underground in a cave with a graduate student to see how the complete darkness would affect their sleep.

Another time, he stayed awake for 180 hours to see what would happen. Since then, scientists have also studied sleepwalking, attributing it to the brain waking up too quickly from a kind of very deep sleep called slow wave sleep. It also seems genetic. Now, people generally are very aware of it. there was sort of an explosion, if you like, of sleepwalking cases, relatively speaking, in the early 2000s and mid-2000s.

I think that's when it really started becoming something that people realized could lead you to commit crimes and therefore could be a defense. In 1987, a 23-year-old man named Kenneth Parks arrived at a police station in Toronto in the middle of the night. He had blood on his hands and said, I think I've killed some people. He was a married man. He had a history of sleepwalking, and at the time of the incident in question,

he'd been under extreme financial stress. Kenneth Parks had become addicted to betting on horse races. He was losing money and started spending his family's savings and embezzling money at work. He was caught, fired, and had to put the family house up for sale. One day, Kenneth went to a gambler's anonymous meeting and made plans to tell his wife's family about the problems he was having. That was a Wednesday.

He resolved to tell them on Sunday. The night before, he fell asleep on the couch, watching Saturday night live around 1.30 a.m. The next thing he remembered was seeing his mother-in-law's face. He was in her house, 14 miles away. She looked frightened. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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so it can fit into your schedule whenever you want. Instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. For a limited time, save 40% on your first month at ritual.com slash criminal. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 40% off your first month. The Toronto Police started putting together what happened after Kenneth Parks fell asleep on his couch. Here's Ramiya Nagash.

He rose from his bed, he walked out of his house, got into his car and drove 23 kilometres to his parents'in-law's house. Once inside their house, he arms himself with a kitchen knife and he brutally attacked his parents-in-law. By all accounts, he was very close to his parents-in-law. This wasn't one of those sort of stereotypical jokes where somebody has animosity with their parents-in-law. He was very close with them. And the attack was so severe that actually it left his mother-in-law dead. He'd killed his mother-in-law by stabbing, and his father-in-law did survive, but was very badly injured. At the police station, Kenneth became aware of injuries to his hands.

He'd cut them very badly during the attack. severing tendons. He was taken to a hospital. An emergency room doctor who saw him noted that he seemed sad, remorseful, and perplexed. At first, doctors thought he might have had a psychotic episode, or been on drugs. But he said he only occasionally drank, and almost never did drugs, and that night he did neither. And he didn't have any history of psychosis. Eventually, Kenneth was sent to a sleep specialist. At first, the sleep specialist was skeptical that he could have committed the crime entirely while asleep.

But Kenneth had sometimes sleepwalked as a child, once he almost went out a window, and sleepwalking ran in the family. In jail, Kenneth's cellmates noticed that he would sometimes sit up in bed with his eyes open, mumbling but unresponsive, seemingly asleep. The jury in the case agreed that Kenneth Parks had been sleepwalking when he killed his mother-in-law. But the judge had to decide whether sleepwalking fell under the defense,

not guilty by a reason of insanity, or something else, called non-insane automatism. Non-insane automatism is effectively when your body is doing something, but your mind isn't in control of it. And an example used in law school is, You're driving along in your car. You've got the window down because it's a hot day. You don't have very good air conditioning. And a swarm of bees flies into your car. And they encircle your head so that you lose control

and you crash into somebody on the sidewalk. That's an example of what we call non-insane automatism because your mind isn't in control of what your body's doing. But you're not insane. You're not suffering from a medical condition. So the judge directed the jury at trial that if the... they were satisfied that he was sleepwalking at the time, they could acquit him entirely, so no punishment, no conviction on the basis that he was suffering from non-insane automatism.

And the jury came back and duly acquitted him. The prosecution appealed, and the case went to the Canadian Supreme Court. The Supreme Court considered the matter in some detail and decided that actually the original judge was right. and they set out some principles for considering cases of sleepwalking and how it should be characterized by the courts. The court used a test to determine whether a condition could be considered insanity. There are two aspects to it, and one is whether or not the person poses a continuing danger, and the second is whether or not the cause of the defect is internal or external.

And they really kind of focused on the continuing danger aspect because on the medical evidence, Kenneth Parks was highly unlikely to commit such an offence again whilst asleep. And so they said, well, effectively in shorthand, they said there's no real point in finding him legally insane and sending him to hospital because there's nothing they can do for him. And so he was fully acquitted and went on to kind of live his life quite quietly after that. But that decision really made shockwaves nationally and internationally.

because it was the first time in modern history that somebody had committed such a brutal offense and been completely cleared of any responsibility because they'd been asleep. So that's where we're left, and I think that's why it exercises the public imagination so much, and the public say, well, hang on a minute, somebody's died here, and we know who did it, but we can't say anything more than that, we can't do anything about it. Ramya Nagash says that in many cases where someone commits a violent act, while sleepwalking, they don't have any history of violence. And secondly, of course, the criminal law is based on punishment and rehabilitation of people who have consciously chosen to do things that are harmful to others or contrary to our kind of societal morals. And the difficulty is in sleepwalking, we lose our ability to control what we're doing.

Today, there are experts who work specifically on what some call sleep forensics, which includes trying to identify the signs of sleepwalking. They will interview the defendant. They will sometimes conduct sleep studies, which is where somebody goes into hospital. They fall asleep in a hospital. They spend the night in hospital, but they're hooked up to all sorts of machines which monitor their breathing, their heart rate, their activity, their brainwaves. and then they determine based on their history and the sleep study

the likelihood that they could have been sleepwalking at the time. So it's not an easy defense. It's not something that people can just fall on to and say, oh, I was asleep. Nine years after Kenneth Parks was first acquitted, a man named Scott Falator, who lived in Phoenix, Arizona, was arrested and charged with murdering his wife, Yarmilla. A neighbor had called nine.

one during the night. He said he saw Scott Falater throw Yarmilla into the pool in their backyard and hold her head under the water. When police arrived, they found Yarmilla Falater dead in the pool. She'd been stabbed many times. Scott was upstairs. He said he was confused and had just woken up. He said Yormilla had asked him to fix their pool filter and that the last thing he remembered was going out to try to fix it at about 9 p.m. When he came back inside, he said Yarmilla was asleep on the couch, and that he kissed her and went upstairs to sleep. At trials, Scott Falata tried to claim he was sleepwalking.

However, prosecution experts said, well, there are several things that tend against that. The neighbourhood called the police so that he'd noticed Scott Falater motioning at his dog. The dog was barking, and he saw Mr. Falato saying, telling the dog to lie down and be quiet. The neighbor also describes seeing Scott Follater put gloves on before he rolled Yarmilla into the pool. And police found bloody clothes and a hunting knife in the back of Scott's car.

Scott Fulater's family said he had a history of sleepwalking. But the prosecutor said he, quote, did not fit the mold of a sleepwalker. Because when we're sleepwalking, we can commit a great deal of actions, we can cook, we can get dressed, we can drive and we can attack somebody. But we can't do things that require complex, intelligent thought. So concealing a crime, trying to tell your dog to be quiet to conceal your crime is evidence of a more intelligent, sort of complex thought.

The fact that Scott Fulatto had been seen motioning his dog to be quiet, and then the fact he'd also hidden his clothes and the hunting knife in the back of his car was said to be indicators that he'd been thinking about the crime and how to cover it up. And so they said, well, that's not something you would do whilst you're asleep. I mean, right, because if you don't know what you're doing, you don't care that your clothes are bloody. Exactly, yeah.

You don't have the ability to think, oh, my clothes are bloody, I better hide them in case the police go. That takes a lot of, if we think about it, that takes quite a few steps of thought. You have to think, well, the clothes are bloody. Secondly, that will implicate me in a crime. Thirdly, if the police see my bloody clothes, they'll realize I've committed this crime. Fourthly, how am I going to hide it?

When you're sleepwalking, you're very objective focus. So you might think, for example, I want to cook something, so I'm going to cook it and you do it. I want to get to this place, so I'll drive to this place. So it's a much more simple thought. Scott Valader was found guilty of first-degree murder and given a life sentence. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from OnePassword. A password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team.

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slash podcast offer and start securing every login. Support for the show comes from OnePassword. A password manager should be the first security purchase you make for your team. Why? Because compromised passwords are the number one way bad actors attack companies and small businesses are their favorite targets. But unlike a lot of security challenges, passwords actually have a pretty simple solution. OnePassword lets you manage all your business credentials so you can feel confident that your data stays secure as your company's grows. Find out more at OnePassword.com slash podcast offer and start securing every login.

The year the Canadian Supreme Court reviewed Kenneth Park's sleepwalking case, the FDA approved a new pill for insomnia, Ambien. The most popular sleeping pill then, Helsion, had been linked to suicide and psychosis and had been banned by the UK and several other countries. In a few years, Ambien became a bestseller. At first, the fine print warned that it could cause abnormal thinking, strange behavior, and hallucinations. It said sleepwalking was possible but unusual, affecting one and a thousand people. But then, people started to tell stories of taking Ambien, going to sleep, and waking up to see emails they didn't remember writing, receipts for things they didn't remember buying,

and rappers from food they didn't remember eating. In April 2001, newspapers reported that R-E-M guitarist, Peter Buck, had been arrested at Heathrow Airport. He was traveling from the US to London to take part in a concert on a British Airways flight, and he took an ambient sleeping pill at the start of the flight. He did drink a lot of wine. Apparently he was topped up 15 times or so.

And then during the flight, he starts attacking stuff. So it started off a little almost comically. He had a pot of yoghurt and a spoon in one hand, and he was sort of throwing them around, and people got sprayed with yogurt. But then he tried to open an exit door in the plane and wrestled with a member of the cabin crew who was stopping him. The captain of the flight gave him a yellow card,

which was something British Airways had incorporated for people who were creating disturbances. So it's effectively saying this is your last warning. He ripped it up in the captain's face and said, Who the hell are you? I'm a member of REM, blah, blah, blah. He upended a serving trolley. And so he really caused chaos.

So when they landed in the UK, he was taken to trial for various offences, assault, criminal damage and so on. And he said he was sleepwalking and he was in a state of non-insane automatism. And interestingly, experts testified that Ambien could actually produce these side effects. And the fact is that when he took

that sleeping tablet, he could not have reasonably foreseen that it would produce those side effects, that it would make him violent in his sleep. Most people know that if you drink a lot, it's reasonably foreseeable that you could become aggressive. It's not in the same way reasonably foreseeable that if you drink a lot and go to sleep, you could sleepwalk and commit a violent act. In relation to Ambien, it follows the same path. So if somebody takes Ambien and falls asleep, that's the expected effect. What's not expected is that they'll sleepwalk then and stab somebody or commit an offense.

And so he was acquitted. It probably helped that he had numerous character witnesses coming to court talking about how he was a really gentle man and this was really out of character and he'd never do anything like that in his right mind and so on. A few years later, in 2006, U.S. Congressman Patrick Kennedy was seen speeding in the wrong lane of traffic

on Capitol Hill in the middle of the night. He hit a curb and then ran into a traffic barrier. He told the police that he was on his way to vote. But the house was not in session. Later he said he was disoriented because he'd taken an Ambien. That year, a study found that the number of car crashes caused by people on Ambien was going up.

A group of people filed a class action lawsuit against Ambien's manufacturer. One plaintiff was a woman who'd been arrested for shoplifting DVDs and a candle from the Navy base where she worked. Others found themselves sleep eating or driving after they'd taken Ambien. In March 2007, the FDA began requiring a stronger warning

on the Ambien label and told the manufacturer to let doctors know about the risk of sleep driving. That year, the generic equivalent of Ambien came out, Zolpidem. Manufacturers added a similar warning, and millions of people started taking it, including Lindsay Schweigert, who just started a new prescription

the day she was arrested in 2011. Lindsay was charged for the DUI and for running a stoplight. As for the car she hit, no one was hurt, and the damage was minor. Lindsay says the repair cost something around $450. I was facing six months in jail, and then I was, that is the criminal side, but then there's the Department of Revenue side. That's like the DMV, the driver's license side. Lindsay's lawyer argued that what had happened was a known side effect of Ambien.

She ended up pleading guilty to a lesser charge, careless driving, to avoid jail time, and her license was suspended for a year. She also paid thousands of dollars in legal fees. Is it still hard to believe that you were able to do all of that while asleep? I mean, that's the seems terrifying. It is so terrifying. And, I mean, I really, I think the other silver lining I took from it is at least I didn't hurt somebody. Talk about never being able to sleep again. She says she hasn't taken Ambien or Zolpidem since.

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or also on YouTube at YouTube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Support for this show comes from Vanta. Vanta uses AI and automation to get you compliant fast. Simplify your audit process and unblocked deals so you can prove to customers that you take security seriously.

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